Archive for October, 2009

Oct

26

Shirtaday Redesigned

October 26th, 2009

For the last three weeks, I’ve been busy completing a total redesign of Shirtaday.com. The site was originally created in early 2006 and was extremely simple at the time.  During the next three years, it progressively grew new features and each of these features were bolted on without keeping a consistent object model or design.  It turned into a maintenance nightmare.  Also, the design had several cross-browser issues with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6.  It also looked poor at smaller screen resolutions.  These are just a few of the issues…I could go on forever about things that I hated about the site.

The goal of the new design was to resolve all of those issues mentioned and to really just make the site much easier to maintain.  Previously, if I changed something, I never really knew for sure just what that’d affect on the rest of the site.

A few of the things that the redesign accomplished:

  1. Better SEO. On the old site, the links to shirts and pages in the warehouse were built using query parameters such as “shirt.php?id=1″.  Most modern search engines completely ignore the query parameters, so our 700+ shirts were being treated as essentially one page.
  2. Paged Warehouse and Shirt Listing.  At one point, the warehouse contained over 120 shirts.  All of these were loaded on the single warehouse page when the user viewed it.  That was a lot of data to load and display, and if you were on a slow connection, it was painful to wait for it all to come down to your browser.  The new design incorporates paging of each list and allows the user to search through the lists using some new search functionality that we built into the site.  For instance, if you want to buy a black, large shirt for less than $10, you can narrow your search to this so that only shirts relevant to your criteria are displayed.
  3. Better design. The original design was table-based, and some tables had tables within them that went three to four layers deep.  Ouch.  What a nightmare that was to maintain.  The new design is completely css based and is much more straightforward to maintain and enhance.  New pages and sections can be plugged in or move around extremely simply.
  4. Better navigation. The main goal at shirtaday is to sell t-shirts and i think the new design helps shirtaday reach that goal better.  I believe it’s more intuitive for a user to come to the site and get through a checkout with a shirt they like.  Purchase options are emphasized with bold print and highlighted colors.
  5. Ajax and jQuery. The new site utilizes ajax and jQuery for many things like voting for your favorite shirt or adding an item to your cart.  This, in my opinion, really enhances the user experience at the site.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Clients | No Comments »

Oct

13

What I Tell My Web Design Clients about Search Engine Optimization

October 13th, 2009

Before I get started, I want to point out that much of my thoughts in this post are based on a recent post by Derek Powazek on the evils of SEO. (Major props to him for fitting in the term “Faustian”!) He makes some excellent points in his post and I highly recommend you go read it when you get a chance.

The point of this post is to discuss some of the things that I tell my clients in the course of designing their website.  Inevitably, as any project moves towards a go-live, the client wants to talk about Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  This is natural, as any one who has spent their hard-earned money on a website wants to get it in front of as many people as possible.  My response to them is always the same.  If you are concerned about SEO, you should be concerned about your content. Your job, as the client, is to explain your website through content that is relevant to what you’d like your site to be searched under.  It’s my job, as your designer, to ensure that that content is structured in such a way that the search engines can find and index it correctly.  So below are a few things that I tell my clients to think about when they are concerned with SEO.

Choose Your Keywords

The first step of any optimization is to decide on a small set of keywords that they would like to target.  Most clients I’ve worked with are in the Austin area so they often find that they want to target keywords like “Austin Landscaping” or “Austin Family Doctor”.  The general idea is that, the more specific the keywords, the better as it will be very difficult for any new site to gain traction on Search Engines for broad keywords like “Family Doctor” or “Landscaping”.  You really have no shot at these unless you are able to get 100s of other sites to link to you, thus upping your PageRank.

Make Your Content Keyword Relevant

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, make sure that your content is relevant to it.  If you create a site about landscaping and are targeting landscaping related keywords, but you’re page is just images and never mentions landscaping…you’re completely missing the point.

As an example, I recently authored a post about image slideshows in jQuery.  I knew before going into it that I wanted to target very specific keywords such as “simple jquery image slideshow”, so I made sure that the title of my post included those keywords and wrote my content in a way that it was relevant to those keywords.  I now receive 20-30 visits per day on that post for those exact keywords.  I know I’ll never be on the front-page for “jQuery” or “slideshow”, but I’m okay with that because the post I wrote is really not targeted for those keywords.

Create Fresh Content and Keep Your Site Updated

This is the one recommendation I make to clients that is very rarely accepted.  You need to take the time to keep your site updated and create new content about your topic so that your site will stay relevant.  No one wants to go to a site that hasn’t been updated since 2003.  Stale content gives the impression that your company is either lazy, doesn’t put importance on its web interface, or is out of business.  So start a blog and talk about your industry or subject-matter expertise and keep the posts flowing.

Get Others To Link To You

This is the strategy where most SEO firms act unethically.  They take your money and pay for links to your site that come through bots, pay for click, or blog spam.  You don’t need this.  What you need to do is seek out other sites in your industry and discuss either advertising on their site or link exchanges.  Blogging also helps out here as others in your community will pick up on your posts and link to your site.  Google’s algorithm is based on links, so the more links you get here (and more importantly, the quality of your links) the better off you will be.

The important thing to remember is not to try to trick anyone.  People don’t like to be tricked and won’t stay at your site long if it advertises itself for something that it’s not.  Don’t paste 100 keywords in your meta tags.  Don’t blog spam.  And most importantly, don’t write content for search engines, write it for your users.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Recommendations | 1 Comment »

Oct

6

Display Posts from Two Wordpress Blogs on the Same Page

October 6th, 2009

I recently got a request from a client of mine to setup two different wordpress blogs for her company and then display the posts from both blogs in a single list on the home page of her web site. I wasn’t able to find much documentation of people doing this type of thing through various searches, so I figured I’d post an entry on it when I finished. As a disclaimer, I’m sure that this can be done more efficiently or in less code. If you have a better way to do it, please leave me a comment. I’m always open to learning new techniques.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Tutorials | No Comments »